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With Summit of Arab Leaders, Iraq Seeks to Shift Image

Preparations in Kahramana Square on Saturday. In other areas of Iraq, suicide bombers continued to wreak havoc last week.Credit
Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press

BAGHDAD — As Arab leaders converge on Baghdad for a landmark summit meeting this week, they will be treated to carefully chosen glimpses of a new Iraq: gleaming hotel lobbies, renovated palaces and young palm trees lining an airport highway once called the Road of Death.

For Iraqi diplomats and officials, the three-day meeting of the Arab League is a banner moment for a country emerging from decades of war, occupation and diplomatic isolation. Iraq’s leaders see a rare chance to reassert themselves as players in a transformed Arab world by hosting the first major diplomatic event here since American troops withdrew in December.

But just beyond the cement walls and freshly planted petunias of the International Zone lies a ragged country with a bleaker view. Out in the real Iraq, suicide bombings still rip through the streets. Sectarian divisions have paralyzed its politics and weakened its stature with powerful neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Iran, who use money and militias to aggressively pursue their own agendas inside Iraq. Despite its aspirations to wield influence as a new Arab democracy, Iraq may well remain more of a stage than an actor.

But that is not for lack of effort to reclaim its role as a powerful player in the region. In recent weeks, Iraqi diplomats intensified a campaign of deal-making and diplomacy aimed at wooing Sunni Arab nations while trying to refute the popular suspicion that its rulers are tools of Shiite Iran.

Iraq and Kuwait recently resolved a $500 million dispute over reparations from the gulf war, an agreement that will now allow Iraq’s state-owned airplanes to venture abroad without fear of being seized to pay off its old war debts. Iraq also agreed to pay $408 million in back pay owed to Egyptian workers who fled Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

And last month, Iraq and Saudi Arabia tried to overcome years of discord and distrust by signing a joint security agreement and discussing an exchange of prisoners. The Saudis also named their first ambassador to Iraq in two decades, though he will remain based in Amman, Jordan.

The summit meeting, the first such meeting of the Arab League since last year’s popular uprisings began to sweep the region, remains a great gamble for Iraq after more than two years and $500 million’s worth of preparations.

“This country has been isolated, sanctioned, was a rogue state expelled from the ranks of the Arabs and Muslims,” said Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. “It was one of our major obstacles to get this country back on its feet, to show it has become a normal country.”

Questions of how to stop the bleeding in Syria are likely to dominate the summit meeting. The Arab League has sent monitoring teams into Syria — which failed to stem the violence there — and called for a peaceful transition. Its leaders are not expected to call for military intervention or armed support to the opposition.

Although Arab League members will probably acknowledge the waves of popular uprising, few observers expect any of them to ask hard questions about the pessimism, violence and stagnation that have set in after the heady rush of the Arab spring.

Iraq is eager to keep any discussion of its own problems out of the meeting. It does not want to talk about accusations of the creeping authoritarian rule under the Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; the bitter disenfranchisement of Iraq’s Sunni minority; or a worsening dispute between Baghdad and Kurdish leaders in Iraq’s north over control of oil resources and division of the national budget.

But Iraq’s weakness abroad starts at home. If it wants to truly re-engage with the region as an independent Shiite Arab nation that can counterbalance powerful neighbors like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, analysts say it will have to move beyond the rigid sectarianism that defines its politics and divides its voice abroad.

“Iraq’s internal issues — and differing interpretations of threats and interests — make it difficult for the country to pursue a coherent, unified foreign policy and to project its influence,” Emma Sky, a former adviser to Gen. Ray T. Odierno, the United States’ onetime commander in Iraq, wrote in a forthcoming paper on Iraq.

Just one day after the last American troops left, the Shiite government set off a maelstrom by accusing the Sunni vice president of running death squads. The political opposition is divided and rudderless. And a progressive youth movement, formed in the image of the Tahrir Square uprising, has been pulverized by arrests, intimidation and infiltration by Mr. Maliki’s increasingly autocratic government.

Vestiges from decades of war linger. Every year, Iraq still pays billions of dollars in reparations to Kuwait for Saddam Hussein’s disastrous invasion. Five percent of Iraq’s oil revenues are being garnished as war reparations to Kuwait, and the two nations are scrabbling over competing ports and access to the Persian Gulf. Its own military leaders admit they cannot secure the desert borders that are conduits for drugs, weapons and militants.

And its efforts at fence-mending — as well as Iraq’s reluctant, tepid calls for change in Syria — may be real steps toward reintegrating Iraq back into the Arab world. Or they could simply be the price Iraq’s leaders are willing to pay to avoid the embarrassment of a half-filled summit hall.

Syria, which has been suspended from the Arab League, will not attend. Syria remains a divisive issue between Iraq and its Sunni Arab neighbors. Recently, Iranian cargo planes suspected of carrying weapons have crossed through Iraqi airspace, bound for Syria, whose government is a staunch Iranian ally. After repeated entreaties from American officials, Mr. Maliki has responded and the flights appear to have all but stopped.

Over the next few days in Baghdad, the leaders at the summit meeting will gather in the former Republican Palace, one of several government buildings and hotels that have been remodeled with new chandeliers, marble, wood trim and the other gilded trappings of what Iraq aspires to look like.

The government has also spent millions to redeploy thousands of security forces to the capital and is juggling transportation and accommodations for thousands of leaders, diplomats and journalists. It has bought 2,000 suits and 2,000 ties with the summit meeting’s insignia. It is corralling 600 cars. It is spending $600,000 on stationery and $1 million on flowers.

In Baghdad’s streets, the response to the Arab summit meeting is complex. Some Iraqis see it as a source of national pride. Others, with a pessimism as hard-baked as desert soil, dismiss it as a waste of money by a self-serving political elite. Fears abound that the summit meeting will attract more suicide bombers to Baghdad than heads of state.

The meeting was postponed last April because of the upheaval in the region, giving Iraqi leaders more time to polish the areas of the city visible to delegates with new sidewalks, streetlights, fountains and grass. But in the poorer precincts of Baghdad, where gutters flow with raw sewage and the power comes on for just four hours a day, little has changed.

Every Iraqi did get one thing, though: In honor of the summit meeting — and to reduce the congestion and chaos of vehicle bans and checkpoints — the government has declared a weeklong national holiday.

Correction: April 5, 2012

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on March 26 with the continuation of an article about Iraq’s desire to use a summit meeting of Arab League leaders in Baghdad as a rare chance to reassert itself as a player in a transformed Arab world reversed the identifications of the two men shown. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, was at the right and Nabil al-Arabi of the Arab League was at the left.

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Arab Summit, Iraq To Display A Rebuilt Image. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe